Scout Tomyris

Becoming Sage

Santa Rosa

CA

95404

(707) 322-2658

I retired from guiding in 2013, knowing that someday I might return. When I retired, I was newly involved with leadership in the intentional community where I live. As luck and life would have it, new opportunities have arisen as my tenure as a board executive is waning. I am starting to guide again. I've stayed active in the WGC, on the Elders Council, and attended a couple of Gatherings during the past decade. I'm attending the 2019 Gathering on Salt Spring Island. As a long-time member of the WGC, it is really exciting to me that we are having our very first Gathering outside the US in Canada. After so many years of calling ourselves a North American organization, it feels so right to me that we expand our most important annual event across borders.

My first vision quest was with Marilyn Riley and Betty Warren of Wilderness Transitions in 1995. I quested with them again the next summer during which I wrote the story "Speaks With Trees" which appeared in the Fall 1999 Vol 10 issue of Circles on the Mountain. I received so much from these quests that I wanted to become a guide, despite the fact that I was a computer professional. Now, many years and numerous quests later, I am so much more than that, even though it's still my day job twice a week. I'm also a naturalist, a writer, a cat mother, a witch, a satsange, deeply spiritual, philosophically intrigued by the mysteriy of existence, an environmentalist, a hiker, a geek and a homebody.

I trained with Anne Stine of Wilderness Rites with her first Apprenticeship Group in 1997. I continued to apprentice with Anne for the next 3 years and co-guided a number of quests with her, including one over the change of the millineum in Death Valley. I served as a contract guide for Rites of Passage Inc from 2003 to 2013. My co-guides were most often Mike Bodkin and, on women's trips, Linda Sartor.

I had a Near Death Experience at the tail end of 2001 when an aneurysm in my brain burst. I like to say "my brain blew up." Having attending WGC Gatherings annually since 1998, I was determined to attend again in March 2002. With a personal assistant, a special room at a nearby motel and the support of my guide friends, I made the trip to Anza Borrega. Years later, in that same desert, I became Netkeeper, a position I held for 3 years.

It was in the context of vision questing that I learned about intentional community and became interested in that lifestyle. I moved to Santa Rosa Creek Commons in 2010.